By Kelly Klaasmeyer June 27, 2013

James Turrell has made light his stock in trade. He generates it, channels it and colors it to create stunning visual experiences that alter our perceptions in ways that range, depending on the viewer, from the hallucinatory to the spiritual. Fifty years ago, Turrell was cutting holes in the walls of his studio in the defunct Mendota Hotel in Los Angeles, creating some of his earliest works with light. Today the 70-year-old Turrell is hoping to complete Roden Crater, a massive decades-in-the making project in which the artist is transforming a 400,000-year-old, two-mile-wide extinct volcano in Arizona into a naked-eye celestial observatory. He estimates it's 60 percent complete. And this summer simultaneous, retrospectives of his work are taking place in three institutions in three cities. There has never been a better time to see Turrell's... More >>>